Migrating from a ibook G4 to a MBP - advice + help please

Hi depends what you mean when you mean migrate, there is the migration application which will migrate your entire user account. However there also the ability to mount your old laptop as a hard drive, take a fire wire plug it into both computers, have the new one turned on and logged in. The old one, hold the "T" button and start it up, this will mount the computer as an external hard drive so you can move, itunes music and such, however be careful with applications, depending on how savvy you are, you will have to move some other folders besides the ones in the applications folder, like in library/application_support. Best of luck.

I migrated from a PPC Powerbook to an Intel iMac in November.

I did some housekeeping on the Powerbook, deleting apps and files that I hadn't used for an age; particularly the ones that weren't Universal. I also went through and checked the apps I did to use to see if there were Universal versions.

Then when I was setting up the new Mac, I used Migration Assistant and it worked incredibly well. Everything came over and worked perfectly.

One caveat though, I tried to do the same to Mum's iBook to iMac last weekend and couldn't get Migration Assistant to recognise the iBook's HD as having OS X installed for love nor money. So I ended up dragging over the relevant files over an ad hoc network.

Brings everything over - keychains, Dock preferences, Menubar items. The whole kit and caboodle. The Dock one is actually annoying since you'll have to manually add the Photobooth/Time Machine one back to it. No biggie. You will need a FW cable handy.

Migration Assistant is smart enough to know not to bring across the older iLife apps (except for iMovie HD if you have it).

Both 'Books were running 10.4.11 IIRC. My Powerbook had done the same thing initially but I repaired permissions after reading the Apple discussions and it successfully moved over.

Mum's iBook should have worked but repairing permissions didn't work at that point and it being a Saturday night with a glass of bubbles awaiting my attention, I couldn't be bothered troubleshooting further - and just transferred over her music/pics/Mail/Calendars etc manually.

There are a few online guides to transferring stuff manually. Copying over your Music/Pictures/Movies is relatively easy. Just look in your User folder for you Mail/Mail attachments folder and put them in the same place in the new system. Same thing with Address Book and your Keychain. The only tricky one is iCal - you need to export the database file on your old iBook and transfer that over, then tell iCal to find it.

If you have .Mac, this is one time it comes in really useful. It will do the whole Address Book/iCal/Mail rules thing for you.

drummerlondonw3 said:

Ok - so even if I have to do it manually I will still preserve keychains and safari settings?

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Only if you drag over the respective folders. Your Safari settings are in your Application Support folder as are your Keychains. I took over the entire contents of Documents/Music/Pictures and just dumped them in the respective folders.

I only have MS office that I run on my ibook

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Remember to take the Microsoft User files from your Documents folder as well as the apps. And delete the Test Run from the new Mac.

When you have to migrate everything manually do you first step up a user account with the same name then copy?

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I've got no idea. I'm not an expert on this - just someone who has done it a couple of times. Both times I wanted a Home folder with the same name as the original so it wasn't an issue.

Don't worry too much - the Migration Assistant should work. If it doesn't, the Apple discussions does have troubleshooting guides and hints on migrating manually.